Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/524

510 Even Boston and Philadelphia produced some; but they shared the fate of most imitations, and soon went their way into oblivion.

Magazine reading in earnest began in this country with the re-publication of "Blackwood," and to most of the book-loving people of the generation now managing affairs in this quarter of the world, that old brown cover, with George Buchanan's velvet-capped head smudgily disfigured or presented upon it, lives in memory as the outward form and semblance of the ideal magazine. There were other magazines published here made up of original matter, some of it very good; but they were, and were called, ladies' magazines; and for many years "Blackwood" furnished to the manly brain of America its monthly ration of current literature. On the whole it was good, wholesome provender, some of it the best that could be produced about that time. Bulwer, De Quincey, Carlyle, Lockhart and Douglas Jerrold were among its contributors. But the flavor of the thing was given by Christopher North (John Wilson), who not only wrote his "Noctes" and "Dies" and "Specimens of the British Critics" for Maga, as he called the magazine, but, in his quality of editor, went over the manuscripts of clever but callow contributors, and gave them form and consistency, adding a zest to their flavor by putting in a plum here and a touch of spice there, and turning them out before the public shapely and savory, like a well-concocted, well-cooked pudding. "Blackwood" was always just what it is in form and in purpose. One hundred and twenty-eight pages, double columns and small type, eight or nine articles in all, one or two of which were often twenty-five to thirty of these closely-printed pages long, almost invariably including one heavy political article upon the question of the day, or, if there were no such question, then upon some question of the past day, with an eye to its present bearing, and always regarded from a high tory point of view; a serial story, and one tale completed in one number—this was the substance of "Blackwood." The Christopher North articles were famous in their day, and were good of their kind; but, to tell the truth, they do not seem to us, taking them cold and in a lump, so fine as they seem to have been thought by the people who had them hot and hot month by month. They are often crude in thought, and inaccurate in statement; and the best part of them is mere animal spirits huddled into words. And then they reek so of pipes and poteen. They belong to a school in vogue at that time which diluted its whiskey with scholarship, and looked at philosophy and the world through clouds of its own blowing. Now whiskey is a comfortable creature in spite of Mr. McCulloch and his emissaries, and tobacco may be smoked by reasonable beings, in defiance of Mr. Parton; but it is well for the writer who uses the one as a sedative and the other as a stimulant